HE DO THE POLICE IN DIFFERENT VOICES

31 Jan 23

As a young man, I loved to look at photographs of writers I admired; Henry Miller, Raymond Chandler, Jean Rhys, Dashiell Hammett, Anais Nin, and Simone de Beauvoir. But my hero in literary terms, and sartorially, was Graham Greene. 

To be honest, there is no reason for a writer to look good. When we are working, no one needs to look at us, tapping away in our pyjamas in our little rooms. And when we are not working, it is better that we fade into the background, since we are observers and not movie stars. 

Speaking of movies and movie stars. 

Unreal city. Billy Wilder. Bogart. City of night. The Doors. Sunset Strip. My first trip to Los Angeles after having been, to my surprise - and to that of Stephen Frears - nominated for an Oscar for my first film, My Beautiful Laundrette. 

Sally and I had been living a quiet life in Baron’s Court, West Kensington. She a social worker, and me, working in various theatres, backstage and as a writer, including Riverside Studios and the Royal Court. Now we are checking-in to the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, also known as Hotel California after the Eagles’s song. A period of impossible fulfilment and vertigo. 

I have an agent and I go to meetings. I am offered work. I meet other British writers working in Hollywood as rewrite specialists. Some are employed just to write the endings of the movies. Others are better at the beginnings. I wonder who writes the middle. 

These British writers seem pallid, despite the weather, and confused and agitated. They are earning good money, and hustling for bigger gigs, but I wonder if they know who they are, and what they are really doing. In truth, they are hired hands who are given a brief, and have to fulfil it. 

I am approached by a very distinguished South American movie director, whose films I admire. He takes me out to lunch at the Four Seasons, and then for a walk along Venice Beach, where we watch the Muscle Marys working out. 

I begin to realize he is interviewing me as a possible writer for his new movie. But I do not want to be interviewed. I don’t necessarily want to write his new movie - though, from another point of view, it would be a privilege. 

He works with the best actors. Hence, the creative vertigo. I become annoyed with him; I am annoyed with myself and I am not sure what I should be doing next. I have already written Sammy and Rosie get laid, the next film I will do with Stephen Frears. 

My first son Sachin and I wrote a film together, soon after he left university. It was partly based on his experience, working as a driver for a rock star. It almost got made, and to my pleasure, he decided that he wanted to become a screenwriter. Soon after, on the basis of this, he was offered a job on a well-known British soap opera. And, after waiting six months – and this was during the Covid period - he was accepted on the show with a two-year contract. 

He earned good money and learned a lot. It was a great gig for a young writer and it developed him as a professional, as someone who could work under pressure and meet deadlines. I began to watch the soap opera every night, and even when he left the show, I continued to watch it.

In fact now, being in Italy, I miss it. I wonder how the characters are doing. The soap opera is obviously the most ludicrous and artificial of all literary forms. One day there is an earthquake, the next a fire, a rape, a bombing, and so on. 

But there is something about the form that works, and which is addictive. Somehow, despite its absurdities, or because of them, there is something about the characters’ anguish that is recognisable.

The reason I bring this up, is that after I left Los Angeles, without an Oscar, but with several job proposals, and returned to London, where I was then offered a good gig on Doctor Who, I turned all this work down. I did this because I felt I would not be able to fulfil these briefs. I could write a bit, but not to others’ demands. 

So I was confused: what sort of writer did I want to be, and how would I find out? Did I want to be a screenwriter at all? After all, the screenwriter is mostly subordinate to the director, the producer, and even to the actors. What was going on with me?

 I guess I did what they call “following your instincts”. I wanted to write as myself and in my own voice. Just because Franz Kafka was a talented writer, it wouldn’t follow that he could write a good Donald Duck movie, or Samuel Beckett work for Billy Wilder. 

I think I realized in Los Angeles that I was a British writer and that, at least for a time, race and the legacy of colonialism and the Empire would be the subject that I would explore. And so, after working on a movie about a rapidly changing Notting Hill - an area that would soon become a millionaire’s playground - called London Kills me, I switched tracks completely and decided after reading Rushdie’s Midnights Children, that I should become a novelist, using my own life as a template. 

After all, Graham Greene, who looked good whether he was in Africa, Cuba or Clapham, wrote at least two very fine movies, many novels, essays and short stories, to a high standard. The novel suited me as a form, because there were no collaborators. 

Collaboration of course is the essence of most art forms. Think of pop, television, cinema and architecture. But I loved the singular voice. Think of David Copperfield, Catcher in The Rye, Portnoy’s Complaint, and The Bell Jar.  

The singularity of the voice drives the story forward. This is a person you want to spend time with. You love their company. You will follow them where they want to take you. Any novel could be as short, as long, as eccentric as you like. I would abandon screenwriting and have a go at this. As a teenager I began as a novelist, and after a long detour, I was finding my way back to it.

I had been travelling a lot, with My Beautiful Laundrette, introducing the film all over the world and giving interviews. Wherever I was, I started to buy books, published in the Sixties and up to the mid Seventies. 

These were books about encounter groups, Taoism, Zen, the Esalen Institute in California, Fritz Perls, Gestalt Therapy, and other forms of semi-hippy self-transformation. 

Zen and the Art of Archery had a particular influence on me. All this came out of my father’s interest in Buddhism and would later function as background to the character of the father in The Buddha of Suburbia. As I was preparing to write this novel, I also wanted to free myself from my adolescent fears and inhibitions. 

I considered myself to be a nervous, if not uptight, and inhibited person. I could speak on stage, but found it difficult to be intimate with others. In the suburbs, where I was brought up, silence if not shyness, was considered to be a virtue.

I wanted to write in a freer voice, not unlike that of Henry Miller. What I wanted was to write the words that were somehow getting stuck or jammed-up in my head. I wondered whether the repressed part of me might contain some of my most interesting ideas. 

Then I picked up my favourite fountain pen, the Mont Blanc, and began…

Your loving writer, 

Hanif x